Rich India: Their own home away from home

And yet, in mini-India, something is missing

Peeyush and Mallika Ranjan with their 6-year-old son, Ankit, outside their home in Sammamish.

Peeyush and Mallika Ranjan with their 6-year-old son, Ankit, outside their home in Sammamish.

Photo: Dan DeLong/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Photo: Dan DeLong/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Peeyush and Mallika Ranjan with their 6-year-old son, Ankit, outside their home in Sammamish.

Peeyush and Mallika Ranjan with their 6-year-old son, Ankit, outside their home in Sammamish.

Photo: Dan DeLong/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Rich India: Their own home away from home

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It's 9 p.m. on a Saturday. Peeyush Ranjan's Sammamish home is buzzing with people, games and loud music. It's party time, and a few geeky Indians from Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Wipro Technologies have converged with their families to let down their hair.

Outside, Lexus and Mercedes drivers jostle for parking space. Inside, the music is Hindi. The movies are Bollywood. The drink is Scotch. And the food is Litti, an east Indian dish made of wheat dough wrapped around roasted spiced stuffing.

Up a spiral staircase, kids are in a different world. Over a platter of macaroni and cheese, strawberries and Indian desserts, they have divided into groups to compete with their GameBoys, play chess and watch a "Harry Potter" movie.

Miles away from their country, amid success, wealth and material comforts, Indians like Ranjan have created a mini-India for themselves -- the only thing this land of opportunity could not give them.

Weekend dinners with Indian friends. Shopping at Indian grocery stores, dining at Indian restaurants -- India isn't very far from their lives anywhere.

But for Ranjan, something is still missing.

Despite the busy social life and his successful career -- in more than 10 years in the United States, Ranjan has pursued two postgraduate degrees, changed jobs four times, set up two investment portals and landed a job with one of the nation's top technology companies -- he longs for India.

"I would want to go back home, to India," says Ranjan, a Hewlett-Packard manager and an IIT alumnus, the top engineering college in India.

His change of heart began last year in June when he visited Bangalore for the first time. "I knew India had changed, but did not know how much until I saw Bangalore," he said.

Bangalore city life, too, had changed. Sprawling residential complexes came equipped with swimming pools. There were pubs and glitzy malls. Ranjan saw Indians savoring life in the fast lane of commercialism, with its trendy gadgets and swanky cars.

For decades, India has witnessed a brain drain. Thousands of bright and well-educated Indians packed their bags for better job prospects and a higher quality of life overseas. Now the Indian economy is surging, its gross domestic product almost doubled from $317 billion in 1990 to $601 billion in 2003.

The brain drain is becoming brain gain. A BBC story in April on returning Indians estimated that more than 25,000 expatriate Indian infotech professionals have returned home in the past four years.

Predictably, techies have been at the forefront of the trend. Indian employees of information technology companies such as Microsoft are happily returning to India. Many are quitting well-paying jobs to set up new businesses back home.

Part of the reason is that money goes further in India. A full-time nanny costs $100 a month, a chauffeur can be hired for as much or less, a cook for $50. Material comforts of the United States don't compete with that, many Indians admit. What's more, India offers proximity to family members.

But these attributes were always there.

What's changed are the career prospects for returning Indians. Job opportunities for well-qualified executives in India have expanded in virtually every sector.

Telecommunications and consumer electronics sectors, for example, are posting double-digit industry growth. The financial services sector is bullish with consumer lending rising from $10 billion in 2001-02 to about $30.6 billion in 2004-05. The information technology industry, which barely existed in 1991, now employs more than 1 million people and generated revenue of $28 billion in 2004-05.

More than 100 Fortune 500 companies have set up research and development facilities in India. Salaries have been rising rapidly. According to Hewitt Associates, India witnessed the steepest salary increases of any nation in the Asia Pacific region last year. And it is expected to maintain the momentum.

In some ways, it's the same kind of promise of opportunity that lured Ranjan and many other Indians to places like Seattle.

Arriving in the United States in 1995 with barely $300 in his pocket, Ranjan -- a graduate of the India Institute of Technology -- finished his master's at Purdue University in 1997 and took his first job with Hewlett-Packard in the San Francisco Bay Area.

But within six months he joined Microsoft, a company that offered him a challenging job and good salary in Seattle.

By 1999, bitten by the dot-com bug, he joined InfoSpace only to quit and join a startup in 2002. Last year he became a Hewlett-Packard employee when it bought out the company.

Now with a full-time job, he is pursuing a master's in business administration from the University of Washington and managing two investment portals that he started in June. He is busy and making good money.

His wife of eight years -- he married straight out of college and she was an undergraduate -- works at Microsoft. Their 6-year-old son, Ankit, goes to a private school, plays basketball and soccer and has enrolled for Hindi and Bollywood dance classes.

Weekend parties and getaways with friends, mostly Indians, are frequent. Last month they went camping with friends; this month they are planning a holiday in Europe.

But the United States no longer feels exciting, Ranjan says.

"With attractive salaries, ample jobs and good lifestyle in India, the value in getting out and working here isn't that great anymore."